Projektdetails

Gesamtkosten:

EU-Beitrag:

Koordiniert in:

Thema(en):

Finanzierungsprogramm:

CSC - Cost-sharing contracts

Ziel

To provide an integrated assessment of the effects of climate change and climatic variability on agriculture in Europe. Research will follow two main themes: (i) the advancement of fundamental research on mechanistic crop-climate modelling, and (ii) the development of methodologies for scaling up site-based crop models to investigate regional climate change impacts.

Current crop-climate research will be extended by improving the performance of existing crop models in extreme conditions and by considering climate change impacts on yield quality as well as general crop physiology. Specifically, experiments on the effects of high temperature events on wheat growth, high temperature events and drought on soya bean growth and elevated CO2 on grapevine growth and yield quality will be performed. All experiments will be conducted in the first half of the project to ensure that results can be used directly to refine and calibrate the relevant crop models. Methods will be developed for applying mechanistic crop models at a hierarchy of scales to enable a full evaluation of the effects of climate change on regional, national and continental agricultural production. Specifically, analyses will be conducted at four principal scales: (i) complex mechanistic crop models will be run at a number of sites throughout Europe; (ii) complex and reduced form mechanistic crop models will be applied at the regional scale for a number of case study regions in Europe; (iii) simplified mechanistic crop models will be developed at the national scale for Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Spain and Great Britain; and (iv) less data intensive mechanistic crop models will be developed at a 0.5 latitude/longitude resolution across Europe. Site-specific and spatial impact models will be developed in parallel. Procedures for integrating results will be devised which clearly differentiate between the scales of analysis and the type of crop-climate interaction modelled. An interactive framework for climate change impact assessment will be developed which integrates scenarios of climate change and climatic variability with agricultural impact models at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Within this framework, the sensitivity of the crop models to changes in both mean climate and the variability of climate will be analysed to identify thresholds in crop responses. Once the nature and magnitude of critical changes in climate are identified the models will be tested with projections of future climate from transient general circulation models. At each step in the impact assessment relevant uncertainties and their interactions will be evaluated, including those from observational, experimental, modelling, scenario and spatial datasets.